Doesn’t President Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Michigan remind you of the time that George W. Bush went to Notre Dame and Bob Jones and told them to stop being such one-issue whiners about abortion?  Or like that time he went to Haliburton and lectured them about keeping costs down, otherwise he would de-fund the National Security State?  Yeah:  just like that!

Personally, I liked this response– mysteriously, it was the final paragraph in the Denver Post this morning, rather than the lede:

Some bosses offer dating tips. Diane Sawyer counsels her colleagues on freezing their eggs.

The anchor of ABC’s World News has long been a sounding board for her famously hard-working staff on a host of personal issues, from dating to the more complex realities of a demanding career. A recurring theme with women: finding time away from the office to meet a partner and have kids before they hit 40. It doesn’t always happen, as Sawyer, who first married at age 42, well knows. When it doesn’t, Sawyer sends her workers to New York University’s Fertility Clinic.

.       .       .       .       .       .      

Three quarters come in because they aren’t ready to have children yet. Some are sent by their parents: I know you want to work, but I want grandkids someday. Many are furious their doctors didn’t tell them about egg freezing sooner. “I want to send Diane a basket of flowers for what she’s doing,” says one childless 40-something in the media.

The idea that one could be a woman in her 40s in the media and not be aware of fertility issues is just completely laughable.  This is the same news media that for at least thirty years has been bullying women to get pregnant before they’re 25 or else!!!  That “childless 40-something in the media” probably spent her college internships back in the 1980s writing scripts that scolded women who didn’t get pregnant by 25, then worked as a producer for TV segments in the 1990s discussing the heartbreak of infertility and the joy of international adoption/IVF babies/donor eggs/babies via surrogacy, and then was promoted to create shows in the 2000s recycling these scripts and story lines on daytime TV, the nightly news, and evening news magazines.

Never mind that women in their 30s or 40s who don’t have children might not have them because they don’t want them.  I wonder how many of Diane Sawyer’s employees submit to this expensive procedure because they’re afraid to tell their bosses or co-workers, “no, thank you, I don’t want children.”  I wonder how many women in their 50s and 60s feel pressure to cast their decisions not to have children as some kind of bad luck or physiological failure, because of the opprobrium they might face if they say, “I’m really not into children, so I didn’t have them?”

But, really:  the notion that these stories offer some kind of secret wisdom that women have never heard of before is just too stupid to believe.

Hope your 2012 is Dy-No-Mite!

Well, friends, Happy New Year and all that crap.  We’re back home on the High Plains Desert, and it’s sunny and reaching into the 50s and 60s this week.  Fun!  I will miss feeling like Jaime Sommers running at sea level for the past two weeks, but it’s time to get back into running at 4,713 feet elevation-shape again.  While I’m out, here are a few linky-dinkies to keep you amused, if not informed. 

• Kyle Smith of the New York Post asks, “Why do feminists reject their ultimate icon, Margaret Thatcher?”  Maybe the better question is why isn’t Margaret Thatcher a feminist?  “‘I owe nothing to women’s lib,’ Thatcher said, and at another point she remarked, ‘The feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison.’”  Duh.  I forgot:  feminists never do anything right, and everything is always our fault.  Women’s careers are never enabled by the work of previous generations of feminists–no, in fact women only profit by heaping scorn on feminism and feminists.
• From the annals of it’s all mom’s fault:  this problem has a name, and it’s mom.  Yes, 1950s middle-class mothers, in addition to being blamed over the years for causing autism, “smothering” their children, and sending a generation of upper-middle class Easterners into a lifetime of psychotherapy, are now being blamed for Public Health Menace #1:  OBESITY!  Awesome!!!  It’s like there’s nothing that can’t be blamed on a generation of women who were just following orders–doctors’ orders, as the article makes perfectly clear, but I guess “1950s physicians may have triggered obesity epidemic” wouldn’t generate as much interest.  Heaping blame on a generation of women who survived the Great Depression in childhood, answered Uncle Sam’s call to labor for the war effort in the 1940s, and then obediently gave up their factory and office jobs to returning servicemen to go home and make babies and participate in consumer society in order to combat the Communist Menace, is not just historically dubious, but it’s also just nasty and aggressive.  Someone has a mommy issue, I guess.  (Don’t miss the advice she gives about breastfeeding, which of course is the solution to all ills:  “Women should breast-feed for at least six months after childbirth or — better yet — take one year off from work and breast-feed.”  Talk about re-creating the 1950s all over again!  I need a Mother’s Little Helper after just reading this bullcrap.) 
• Tenured Radical offers a thoughtful post on “What I learned at my first job,” as she prepares to move to another institution.  Congratulations and good luck!
• Here’s a question for all of you historians and grammarians out there:  do you say or write  “a historian,” or “an historian?”  I’ve always thought an historian to be a rather affected (as well as outdated) construction, but I learned recently that a colleague of mine is telling our graduate students that an historian is correct.  (Here’s my personal beef:  no one ever considers how dumb and distracting this sounds to people named Ann or Anne, for some reason, and there are an awful lot of us who are in the historical profession.)  So I say “an historian” no, Historiann yes!  (After all–as Eddie Izzard might say, “because there’s a f^(king AITCH in it!”)

Plagiarists have no idea how much they don’t know, and no clue about how much we know about our own subject as well as how much we know about what they don’t know.  The ones that always amuse me most are the students who think they’re being clever by using a book 80 or 100 years old.  Google books is now making that scheme pretty transparent, but it just kills me that 1) they think that academic interests and writing styles aren’t subject to change over time, and 2) that it’s not patently obvious when they plagiarize something written by a fusty academic writer from the 1920s or 1930s (or even earlier) and try to pass it off as work by an early twenty-first century college student.

Effective plagiarism requires more dedication and ingenuity than just completing the assignment honestly.  I sincerely wish my students would take the easy way out and just write an honest paper!

Via The Daily Beast we learn that Newt Gingrich has called for the repeal of child labor laws and for children to perform the janitorial work in their schools.  At Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government!  I’m not kidding–there’s a video at the bottom of the linked story.  This makes his 1994 proposal to bring back orphanages look almost responsible and moderate. (Gingrich’s recent thoughts on child labor makes Michele Bachmann’s comments from an earlier debate this summer look positively prescient!)

I don’t know about the rest of you, but by my lights that’s really slapdash janitorial work.

What is it with these Republicans?  They respect life until it achieves a third grade education, and then it’s down to the mines?  Why don’t they just cut out the middle man and, in the words of the old Dead Kennedys song, “Kill the Poor?”

This video only confirms my already very low opinion of college and university campus “police.”  My personal experience on two different campuses is that they are thugs who hassle only people who are sure to pose no threat to them whatsoever, and that they leave the real miscreants alone.  I was working alone in my campus office one late Sunday afternoon at a former university when an amped up campus police officer with a billy club burst into my office without knocking and threatened me.  (He assumed that only a thief would have the light on on a Sunday night.  I assured him it was my own office and that I was working there legally, showing him my keys.)  At another former university, I was pulled over and ordered out of my car for mistakenly driving the wrong way an exit-only parking lot egress.  (There was no danger to anyone else–there were no other cars trolling around that parking lot anyway.)

But these are far from the worst stories I’ve heard.  A former student of mine–a truly gentle and inquiring spirit of small- to medium build who spent several years after graduation riding his bike through Mexico, Central, and South America–told me a truly horrifying story about being stopped and arrested for drunk walking across the Baa Ram U. campus.  He had gone to the bars with some friends, and being responsible young men, they walked downtown.  On their way back to campus, his friends went one direction and as he continued walking quietly by himself he was stopped by campus police who accused him (rightly) of being drunk.  He explained that he was 21 and just walking home, as he understood he should do when inebriated, and showed them his I.D.  These campus “police” officers illegally detained him and transported him to an off-campus drunk tank. 

Meanwhile, of course, I’m assuming that there were rowdy parties and all kinds of underage drinking going on, large parties where people were probably being sexually assaulted, but busting up those parties would be difficult and potentially dangerous.  It was much easier to harass and detain the solo drunk guy who wasn’t doing anything illegal or any threat to anyone.  I encouraged him to lawyer up and sue, but being a gentle soul I don’t think he did anything.

I saw a former colleague last night who left Baa Ram U. for the University of Chicago.  He informs me reliably that the UC campus police now patrol much of Hyde Park, not just the campus within its own boundaries.  This is what the modern police state looks like:  private police forces, accountable to no one, not looking for trouble but rather just looking for low-risk opportunities to remind the non-criminal majority who’s really in charge.

Via RealClearBooks, we learned recently that he’s got a new book called The Origins of Political Order, and unsurprisingly, he is completely wrong again.  But you have to admit that it’s pretty cute that he has more in common with Karl Marx and with the first generation of Soviet historians than his modern peers because of his unshaken, dumba$$ theory of history’s inevitable destination.  Reviewer John Gray asks,

[H]ow could laws of history underpin human progress when views about what constitutes progress are so ephemeral and so divergent? Some human values are universal and enduring, but ideas of progress come and go like fashions in hats. Theories of convergence reflect disparate and incompatible ideals of human betterment. What all such theories have in common is that they have come to nothing. None of the regimes that was believed to be the near-inevitable end point of modern development has emerged anywhere in the world. 

Fukuyama shows no sign of being discouraged by this record of failure. The faith that the world is set to converge on a single type of government is central to his view of things, pervading this bulky and tiresome book of nearly six hundred pages, the first of two projected volumes. The same faith animated the celebrated essay that he published in The National Interest in the summer of 1989, called “The End of History?,” in which he proclaimed that “the universalization of Western liberal democracy” is “the final form of human government.” To any detached observer at the time, it was perfectly clear that history had not stopped but resumed: like the past, the future would be shaped by ethnic and religious conflicts and resource wars, while more complex types of ideological conflict would replace the cold war stand-off.  Yet three years later, when Fukuyama published a book-length version of his claim, called The End of History and the Last Man, the question mark attached to the essay had disappeared. Like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose monumental eulogy to Stalin’s Russia, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935), appeared in later editions with the question mark removed, Fukuyama was completely confident that a new era in the history of humanity had arrived.

Like, no doy!  How do books like this get published and taken seriously?  (Personally, I think it’s an occupational hazard of doing extremely old-fashioned political and diplomatic history, but YMMV.  No one with any familiarity with archives or with the experience of creating new knowledge can escape being amazed by the role of chance and contingency in history.)  Read Gray’s whole review–it’s pretty windy on the first page, but the next two are actually about Fukuyama’s book and so are much more effective. 

Personally, I say that Fall Break (next week for us) and an enormous cocktail (tonight!) are the end of history.  At least they sound more believable to me than the notion that liberal democracy is truly where the world is spinning.

Associate Vice Provost of Incentivization

Of all of the contributions I’ve had to the “crisis” of higher education meme inspired by Tony Grafton’s recent review in the New York Review of Books, no one has yet called out administrators and/or administrative bloat.  Most of us humanist faculty types appear to see the liberal arts college administrators as tapdancing as fast as they can with the budgets handed down by the central administration.  (Or, perhaps the other problems just loom larger–who knows?) 

Well friends, that changes today with this guest post by commenter truffula, who is a department head in the natural sciences at an urban university.  She identifies the “growth toward a corporate organizational structure” as the burr under her saddle these days.  She asks, given the budgetary pressures in public higher ed, can we really afford all of those administrators, especially when the ones at her uni seem to be more dedicated to their own salaries and perks than to serving the students or the general public?  She portrays the administrative class at her uni as barbarian invaders of the groves of academe, “harvesting as much as they possibly can and . . . salting the fields.”

Take it away, truffula:

A colleague whom I love dearly has this crazy scheme to storm out of the castle, form guilds, and conduct our transactions directly with our customers. Unfortunately, his preferred alternative to the brick and mortal castle is the interwebs. I’ve argued with my colleague about the pedagogical problems and the risk of ghettoization associated with online classes but I can’t dismiss his idea entirely and here’s why: the maintenance costs associated with the modern university president, vice presidents, provost, vice provosts, and various assistant and associate deans are very high.

Here at Provincial State U, a large public university, our growth toward a corporate organizational structure has led to what some would call an administrative bloat problem. Some code of public relations suggests that it is bad to give one of the dozen or so vice presidents/provosts a raise in these times of furloughs and hiring freezes so instead the big bosses create new job titles and promote internally to fill those jobs–at higher pay, natch. The administrative class didn’t get where it is today by being stupid. But the costs of professional administrators are more than just their salaries. They’re harvesting as much as they possibly can and they are  salting the fields.

I do not know but my guess is that our upper administrators have all read books or attended management seminars in which they learned about the importance of well-defined hierarchies. (I guess this because I’ve been told that as a department head, I am supposed to impose such a structure. For the record, I refuse.) The hierarchy is important in part because it simplifies the assignment of blame when things go awry but it also sends a strong message about the individual’s place in our campus society. This growing class structure is the source of considerable resentment. When observable inequity is paired with increasing work loads among the classified staff—due to a combination of factors, including enrollment growth without increased staffing—it leads to distress. People with deep institutional knowledge either quit, check out, or sink into productivity-stifling depression. These are costs we should add to our accounting.

Every administrator who is on a career path understands that goals must be set and met so that ze may be judged to have excelled at hir work. The university is a huge and complicated organization so for evaluation purposes, those goals must be represented by simple metrics, that is, numbers. The reduction of the educational endeavor to a set of numbers either met or not, changes how we understand our mission and sets departments up to fight with each other for warm butts in seats.  These are more costs we should add to our accounting of the professional administrative class.

Suppose I set a pedagogically sound enrollment cap of 20 on a class, the class schedulers put me in a room with 30 seats, and I enroll 15. Now, 15 is a solid turn-out for an upper division specialty class in my department but when the VP for Fiscal Strategies (really, we have one)  reviews the spreadsheets, what ze sees are two problems: first, the mismatch between the cap and the size of the room is underutilized space, and second, I have 5 (or 15) seats worth of unrealized revenue.  The evaluation is even worse if I’d managed to attract 18 souls the last time I taught the course—now I’ve lost revenue over time.  If I held class outside, perhaps in the shade of an old oak tree, I would not have these problems. I’d have to draw all the figures in the dirt with a stick but I think I can do that.

Many of us down in the trenches at Provincial State U are going to counselors now. Our jobs are driving us crazy but we can’t afford to walk away. The psych professionals tell us that our anger and sadness are entirely rational responses to the corporatization of our university. “Just try not to yell so much,” they say, “try to hold on until you can retire.”  I think the counselors are right, what ails us at my large state university does have its roots in our transformation into a public corporate organization but it is not just that. What ails us are the class divisions associated with hierarchical ordering of people and the performance-metrics drive to value quantities that are not about learning.

(It may also be that if these administrators–the university equivalent of corporate executives–were really any good they would not be slumming here with us but would in fact be running successful corporations. Maybe our execs are not very good.)

As I understand it, the first western colleges were collectives formed to protect the rights of students and teachers. If we could fix the corporate disease–if we could think more collectively about the endeavor of higher education–we could stop fighting for student contact hours, a battle that leads us to water down classes and drive down expectations. If we could fix the corporate disease, we could pay our staff more equitably and stop thinking of each other as the problem.

What do you think, dear readers?  Does this resemble at all your university?  Can you relate?  Are there any administrators out there who want to offer another perspective on what she calls “administrative bloat?”  (Or should we call that adminsitrative “PUMP you UP?“)

Me & my best friend!

Howdy, friends!  It’s lovely, sunny, and warm, so I’m off on a run.  Here are some interesting tidbits I found elsewhere on the world-wide timewasting web for those of you not enjoying perfect autumn weather today:

• Via RealClearBooks, Eleanor Barkhorn on “What Jeffrey Eugenidies Doesn’t Understand About Women,” after reading his new book, The Marriage Plot:  “There’s one way, however, in which [the protagonist] Madeleine defies believability: She has no true female friends. Yes, she has roommates and a sister with whom she once had ‘heavy’ emotional conversations, but these relationships are characterized more by spite than affection. And, sadly, The Marriage Plot is just the latest story to forget to give its heroine friends. There are countless other Madeleines in modern-day literature and film: smart, self-assured women who have all the trappings of contemporary womanhood except a group of friends to confide in.”  Have you noticed this about recent books and films?  I have to say that I hadn’t until Barkhorn pointed it out.  She concludes, “The great irony, of course, is that the old-fashioned, marriage-plot-bound books that Eugenides attempts to modernize in his new novel actually do a better job of portraying female friendship than The Marriage Plot.”  I think I may read this anyway–a library codex copy of the book, of course–because I’m a huge fan of “marriage plot” authors like Jane Austen and the many Brontes, but Barkhorn makes an interesting argument here.
• Isn’t it cute when right-wing religious nuts start condemning each other to hell?  Robert Jeffress vs. Bill Donahue, plus all Catholics, Mormons, Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims, of course.  Taking victimology to new heights, Anita Perry cries that her handsome husband Rick has been “brutalized . . . because of his faith.”  Mark my words:  the majority of Americans will not reward this kind of religious pride, which just stinks of hubris and un-neighborliness.  Even if they privately agree with him, Americans are fundamentally uncomfortable with the Jeffress style of public religious condemnation.
• 1970s flashback:  Do any of you remember the sensational book Sybil, about the girl with multiple personality disorder?  Check out Laura Miller’s review of Debbie Nathan’s Sybil Exposed, which details the twisted relationship between “Sybil” (Shirley Ardell Mason) and her therapist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur.  Mason had finally moved out of Wilbur’s house and had achieved her goal of becoming an art teacher and even a homeowner by the time Flora Rheta Schreiber published her sensational account of “Sybil’s” 16 personalities, but sadly the publicity for the book (and the fact that Schreiber disguised her case study pretty poorly) led Mason to flee her independent life and move back in with her therapist.   
• John Judis actually reviews all 528 pages of Ron Suskind’s book, Confidence Men:  Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President.  He finds it trustworthy on balance and the annoying small errors the result of “the current practices of some large American publishers, who spend little time or money on copy-editing or fact-checking and rush books out without much editorial pressure. As far as I can tell, Suskind’s errors are not discrediting.”  His problem is with the “education of a President” part of the book, as Judis disagrees with Suskind’s optimistic conclusion that President Barack Obama “gets it” about what went wrong in his first two years, and mocks the President’s interest in “telling a story” with his presidency:  “In fact, Obama had run for president and governed on the basis of a story—a story he articulated in his Democratic convention keynote address in 2004—of an America that is not red, blue, white, black, or brown, but a ‘United States of America.’ This appeal resonated during the election, but as early as January 2009, when he was informed that Republicans as a bloc would oppose his stimulus program, he should have known that it had little basis in reality. He clung to it anyway. It governed his attitude toward Wall Street and toward the hard-line Republican opposition; and it led him to jeopardize his presidency and the country’s future. Yes, there was a failure of communication, but it was not because the President didn’t have a story. It was because the story was pure fiction. . . . Suskind may have set out to write a book about a president learning from his mistakes, but he may have ended up writing one about a failed presidency.”  His words, friends, not mine, so don’t get your panties in a bunch this weekend, m’kay?